The Barbenheimer aftermath

The bomb and the bombshell.

After months of hype, Barbie and Oppenheimer hit theaters last Friday, and the result was one of the most notable box office success stories since Top Gun: Maverick rattled theaters last summer. 

In fact, it may be more notable than the success of Tom Cruise’s legacysequel (particularly since Cruise has proven fallible, with the latest Mission: Impossible struggling financially). At a time when the box office is up and down, to put it mildly, with no clear understanding of what makes a hit and every success requiring an asterisk so we know the numbers are good, but not pre-2020 good, these are two bona fide success stories.  

Barbie opened at number one, raking in an insane $160 million domestically. That’s the biggest opening of the year, smashing past Super Mario Bros’ April debut. It’s also the largest opening ever for a movie directed by a woman. It did so alongside competition from director Christopher Nolan, who has a streak of impressive box office successes. The competition didn’t hurt Oppenheimer, either; the film made $80 million this weekend, for the best opening for a Nolan film that does not feature Batman. 

I’m not going to get into a review here, as I think Perry and I are going to try to unpack both films in a new episode of We’re Watching Here later this week. I did review Oppenheimer for CinemaNerdz. And I will add to the praise for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, which in addition to being the funniest film I’ve seen all year, is by turns smart, angry, weird and shockingly beautiful. I don’t think either film is perfect; Oppenheimer’s final hour could be trimmed by about 30 minutes, and I still think the director has issues with his female characters. And I think Barbie could have benefitted by cutting the Mattel CEO storyline and using that time to flesh out America Ferrara’s character. But any complaints I have don’t distract from the fact that these are two movies I am quite happy to have seen, and among the best films of the year so far. 

The box office success for both, in fact, is even more astonishing when you consider how easily these movies could have pushed away audiences. Oppenheimer is a 3-hour, R-rated movie with several sections in black and white. It’s dialogue heavy, with most of its scenes taking place in laboratories, classrooms and courthouses, focused on conversations about quantum physics, nuclear proliferation and political ideologies. It’s a dense film, and Nolan’s pacing is almost exhausting. It ends with the suggestion that its protagonist gave humanity the keys to its own destruction. 

On the surface, Barbie’s success is a no-brainer and, indeed, I’ve seen some people want to caveat its success by saying “well, it’s another IP-based film.” And, indeed, it’s based on one of the most popular and successful brands ever created. But Barbie doesn’t give fans exactly what they might have initially thought they wanted. In fact, it’s a PG-13 movie that isn’t even aimed at its core audience; I can’t take my 7-year-old daughter to see it (but one day, she’ll love it). And while its aesthetic is predictably pink and recognizable, it’s not a Super Mario Bros-esque brand celebration. It’s more of a brand interrogation, a film that examines what Barbie is, for good and ill, and then expands on that to tackle male fragility, female empowerment and our relationship with our creator (seriously). It’s a surprisingly deep, sometimes moving, movie that is also jam-packed with very funny jokes and a surprising amount of Matchbox 20’s “Push.” 

What I’m saying is that these were not sure things. They are well-made, thoughtful movies, but they ask audiences to do the work. There’s an alternate universe where Oppenheimer is too cerebral and grim and Barbie too preachy and subversive, and we’d be writing whole different articles. So what happened this time? 

I have no idea, but I think it’s less than any one thing and more of a perfect storm. 

First, as a Facebook friend pointed out, you can’t discount the genius marketing. Universal’s marketing team positioned Oppenheimer as an event a year ago, when those first IMAX trailers appeared with Nope and they had the ingenious idea to market everything with a real-time countdown. It played up the involvement of Nolan – who Universal wooed away from Barbie studio Warner Brothers – and the idea that this was an important movie, one that you had to see on the biggest, loudest screen imaginable. 

Likewise, Mattel and Universal bombarded us with Barbie. Around the same time we were seeing that Oppenheimer trailer, they were dropping photos of Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken, respectively. They leaned into the film’s pastel pink, Dream House aesthetic and the trailers perfectly captured both the familiarity of the brand and the overall WTF-ness of Gerwig’s visual style and the script’s weird narrative twists. 

It’s also the rare example of perfect counterprogramming, and kudos to both studios for leaning into it. The viral event that was #Barbenheimer was everywhere, with people playing off the competing aesthetics and subject matter of the movie and devising plans for double features that allowed them to wallow in Nolan’s darkness before getting their dessert with Barbie. The films’ stars took pictures outside theaters showing the competition. It was the rare event where people weren’t rooting for one over the other but rather celebrating the existence of two movies at opposite ends of the entertainment spectrum. And while this is far from the first time studios have used counterprogramming to their benefit, I can’t remember the last time two films existed at such polar ends and audiences have leaned into their differences. 

Of course, online hoopla or talk within the film community doesn’t guarantee success; if it did, we’d have sequels to Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World and Snakes on a Plane by now. And marketing alone can’t save movies, as Disney is finding out the hard way this year. So what else happened? 

Some box office pundits suggest that maybe audiences are tired of sequels, comic book movies and franchises, and point to the lackluster box office of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, The Flash and Fast X. And that’s possible; trends and fads run their course, and audiences can get fatigued. But for all the franchises that have failed, there have been success stories like Creed 3, John Wick: Chapter Four and Guardians of the Galaxy vol 3. You can’t even really blame it on superhero fatigue in a summer where both Guardians of the Galaxy and Spider-verse sequels have done very well for themselves. And do you really think people are going to embrace Super Mario Bros and Barbie and then turn up their noses at their all-but-guaranteed sequels?

I think it’s some combination of all of these. Yes, the marketing was on point, and people were paying attention to online trends. And while I don’t think people are tired of beloved franchises and superhero movies, I do think audiences are tired of Hollywood’s cynical attitude towards these. Too many franchises feel obligatory these days; Hollywood churns them out and has too often depended on people going to see them because they’re the only game in town. But I think the pandemic – and, more specifically, the speed with which these movies end up on streaming – has changed our habits. People will still show up at the movies; we’ve seen that over and again during the last three years. But I think people are a bit more selective about what’s worth showing up for. 

And maybe that’s positive. Because the two movies that succeeded this weekend are good movies, each with certified “Fresh” ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. And the movies that have succeeded this year have, by and large, been movies met with enthusiasm by audiences and critics. Across the Spider-Verse is an experimental and emotional bit of animated experimentation. Guardians of the Galaxy drops a lot of the Marvel connectedness and dependency on Easter eggs to, instead, deliver an emotionally resonant conclusion. John Wick 4, Creed 3 and Evil Dead Rise show that there are still ways to tell franchise stories with new style and energy. And smaller movies have also succeeded. I’ve been heartened that Asteroid City (which I caught up with recently and loved; I might write about it at a later time) was an arthouse success, and that smaller films like Cocaine Bear and M3gan, whatever their merits, have been successful. Maybe this means audiences want something new, something engaging and something with quality. Maybe it means critics are relevant once more. 

I’m not completely sold. I do think that the joy of this big box office weekend is going to fade in the final month of summer, when I don’t think we have much chance of another film capturing attention in the same way (Haunted Mansion, Ninja Turtles and The Meg 2 might have their pleasures, but I doubt we’re going to see a redux of Barbenheimer). I don’t know how audiences are going to react when Martin Scorsese puts out a 3.5-hour crime drama and the IP and bombast give way to awards season. And maybe the balance between quality and box office success will tilt again; it happens. I don’t think we’re back to normal just yet, especially with the dual strikes wreaking havoc on the lineup. 

But for the moment, we can celebrate a weekend where two very good movies were all anyone was talking about for a weekend. Which ones did you all see? Which did you enjoy?